The Hard Work Of Happiness: A Guide To Living A Life Of Pleasure, Purpose & Meaning

By Reb Buxton

What if your mind was your greatest asset? What if it didn’t sabotage you with pessimistic thoughts about your body, your salary, or feelings of unworthiness? What if your mind worked for you?

It is important to understand that every action you take is to make yourself happy (or more accurately stated to make a “part” of

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Flow Farm Press
• Release date: May 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732378810

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The Hard Work of Happiness:

A Guide To Living A Life

of Pleasure, Purpose & Meaning

Copyright © 2018 Reb Buxton

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

This book is not intended as a substitute for the counseling advice from a trained psychotherapist. The reader should consult a professional in matters relating to his/her mental health and particularly with respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.

ISBN 978-1-7323788-0-3

Design and illustrations by Tim Delger

Printed in the United States of America

Published by The Flow Farm Press

810 Dominican Drive

Nashville, TN 37228

www.TheFlowFarm.com

Visit the author’s website at www.RebBuxton.com

Contents

Foundations

1

Introduction

Beginning

Stacking–Part 1

Stacking–Part 2

The Cycle of Self-Determination

The Footstool & The Clocktower

Enneagram

Attachment

Internal Family Systems

The 8 C’s

The 8 C’s

Compassion vs. Apathy

Compassion in Action

Calm vs. Chaos

Curiosity vs. Arrogance

Courage vs. Cowardice

Connected vs. Lonely

Creativity vs. Rigidity

Confidence vs. Insecurity

Clarity vs. Confusion

Clarity

Tools

Relationships–Part 1

Relationships–Part 2

Anxiety–Part 1

Anxiety–Part 2

Facing Your Fears

Young Man/Old Man

S.T.A.R.

Author’s Note

I am among the fortunate who can answer with confidence the age-old question of Why am I here? It is my profound privilege and purpose to help others learn how to alleviate unnecessary suffering. By doing so, what is left is sacred, and sacred suffering has a purpose. If we must suffer, and we all must, then let us suffer well and together. By suffering well, we write new endings to our painful stories. Through this intentional act of rewriting our history, we redeem those lonely, dark nights of despair into stories of resilience. As we heal, the love we are given and the love we give become the ultimate, defining purpose of life, filling our cups to overflowing with gratitude and joy. May your life be rid of all unnecessary suffering and may it be filled with an abundance of compassion, calmness, courage, creativity, clarity, connectedness, confidence and curiosity. May you free yourself from unnecessary burdens and wrestle well with your sacred suffering and find authentic happiness.

Part 1

Foundations

1

Introduction

On the corner of High Street and Wall Street in New Haven, Connecticut, sits an austere art deco building erected in 1963. In this building are housed some of the rarest manuscripts in the world. The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is, as Robert A. M. Stern, Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, describes it one of the great treasure houses of Yale.

One of the library’s strange yet alluring features is the soaring central book tower with more than 180,000 rare titles. This monolith inside a monolith stands as a tribute to the history of the written word. Beneath it in the underground book stacks are one million more unusual manuscripts nestled comfortably in temperature- and humidity-controlled rooms.

Sitting undisturbed most days in another climate-controlled chamber filed under the uninteresting designation MS 408 is a 272-page manuscript that serves as one of the greatest literary mysteries in history. The Voynich manuscript, named after the Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich who purchased the item in 1912, is a codex written in the early 1400s most likely in a small village in northern Italy. The actual text is written in an elegant but unknown language. Professional and amateur cryptographers alike have poured over the text, and each and every one have met the same fate. Even the famed American and British code breakers, including National Security Agency (NSA) experts, have been unable to unlock its mystery.

Theories abound as to the origin and meaning of the text. Some believe it to be a hoax. Some say it may have been inspired by extraterrestrials. Others believe it may be incoherent religious ramblings manifested during free writing sessions or glossolalia experiences. Still others think it is a simple encryption system that was adapted and augmented by adding meaningless and duplicate symbols, false word breaks and the transposition of letters. Whatever the case, the mystery still stands.

Historically speaking, writing and decoding secret messages goes back many thousands of years to 1900 BCE from a period known as the Old Kingdom of Egypt¹. These nonstandard hieroglyphics carved into the walls and tombs were the first known attempts to disguise a message using secret codes and encryptions. It is believed that these were meant more for mystery and intrigue than passing secrets, but they were coded messages nonetheless. Today cryptography and cryptanalysis are big business with nations, armies, terrorist organizations and businesses attempting to protect (or steal) trade secrets.

Everyone loves the intrigue of mysteries and secrets. It may be a secret handshake between best friends in 4th grade or the cutesy phrases lovers whisper to one another in public knowing no one else will understand. It is our penchant for privacy that attracts us to secrecy.

In every field of inquiry man has created to understand this fascinating and bizarre world, unsolved mysteries abound that puzzle the best and brightest among us. This includes the field of brain science.

Advances in neuroscience and technology have provided us with lifesaving innovations and a profound understanding of the structure of the brain that were unimaginable even a hundred years ago. One example of this extraordinary ability to map the brain is that we now know our brain has approximately 86 billion neurons. Each single neuron makes up to 40,000 connections, resulting in trillions of connections. As a point of reference there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The cosmic joke is that despite our profound insights and scientific advances, each and every new baby born is another Voynich manuscript cloaked in mystery.

It is as if each person’s brain is a secret text full of profound mysteries that we cannot fully fathom. Yet this lone organ is the final arbiter in how we think, how we act and each decision we make. Science and religion offer a fair amount of guidance and wisdom to help us navigate the world, but ultimately everything we experience must first pass through our brain. In one sense we are held captive to the capacities and abilities of our brains. We cannot get outside of ourselves, and no one can join us in the inner sanctum of our mind.

What you will discover in the following pages are specific and practical ways to understand how your brain/mind system, including your conscious and unconscious, are configured. Once you better understand these powerful, dynamic structures, you will have a greater appreciation for how your brain receives, translates and interprets information.

Whenever we are given knowledge, we are actually being given the power of choice. We have the right to do a lot with this new information or nothing at all. For those who choose the courageous path of self-discovery, all of life becomes a resplendent adventure to understanding the mystery of who we are, why we are here and why we do what we do. As you do this good, hard work, life will reward you with joy, meaning, play, love and, yes, authentic happiness.

We all have issues that we have been struggling with for a very long time, sometimes years. These will often feel impossible to solve. We have tried everything we know to do, yet they keep returning like an army of cockroaches. Impossible problems rarely, if ever, have easy, straightforward answers. Here are a few examples of life’s impossible problems:

Should I leave my troubled marriage or stay for the children?

Why do I keep dating (and breaking up with) the same type of person?

Why do I have this non stop brain filled with anxiety that prevents me from enjoying my life?

I hate my job, but I don’t know what to do. I’m not trained to do anything else. I’m married now and have kids. It’s too late for me to go back to school.

Decoding the mystery of who you are is hard work. No one gives you an owner’s manual of how to be a successful adult and live a happy life. You have to figure out a lot on your own. If you want to jump to the head of the line, you must explore what is going on beneath the surface of your conscious, day-to-day awareness.

This book makes two assumptions. First is that you have two minds. One of those minds is conscious, and the other is unconscious. The unconscious is more powerful, yet its fatal flaw is that it lacks conscious awareness, hence the need for the less powerful, more nimble conscious mind. The more you understand the interplay between your unconscious and conscious mind, the greater your ability to positively, thoughtfully and intentionally create the life you want. Imagine two people rowing a boat. If they are not working together, or worse, working against each other, they will not make much progress. Once they begin to work together, they can zoom across the lake. As a note, a more realistic comparison in this boating metaphor would be that the conscious mind is the boat, paddles and people who are in the boat and the unconscious is the enormous lake upon which they are floating.

It is incorrect to think that information flows only one way from your unconscious to your conscious mind. There is a deep interplay between the two. For example, most of us don’t think much about how our personality is constructed. We automatically respond to stimuli according to what we think will make us happy. But just because you don’t typically examine a particular feature of your unconsciously driven personality doesn’t mean you can’t.

Directing focused attention at a particular aspect of your personality (e.g., the tendency to go to anger too quickly, perfectionism, people pleasing, worrying, etc.) can significantly improve this trait and as a result improve your lives. It is true that what you focus on will flourish. This is one example of how the conscious mind can influence the unconscious.

The same is true when you understand how you attach to others. If you are aware of your attachment style and that of your partner and how those two dynamics interact early on in the dating dance, you will better understand how both of you will act in moments of stress. For example, someone with an avoidant attachment will need more time alone to process and feel calm than an anxious or securely attached individual. Once you are aware of this, you can choose what you are willing to tolerate or not. Even this one insight can be the difference between living a long, happy life together or enduring a marriage filled with constant disappointment and misery.

The second assumption is that your mind is, for all practical purposes, infinitely complex and therefore must operate in multiplicity. This simply means that your mind is made up of parts known as subpersonalities. Each part has its own thoughts and opinions that often disagree with other parts, thereby creating internal stress. This explains simply and elegantly how you can hold many opposing thoughts and ideas on the same topic without being psychotic. Each part wants what it believes is best for you. It has strong opinions about how to manifest those desires. Sometimes when various parts disagree with each other, the relationship becomes hostile. Anyone forced to participate in a dysfunctional group can appreciate how difficult it can be to get anything done when there isn’t a healthy synergy among the members. One way to create a healthy mind is to build a bridge of understanding among your parts that will allow them to share their perspectives and communicate effectively. This is one way to jump to the head of the line when it comes to being happy in love and life.

By the time you finish this book, you will have a fundamental understanding of the systems at work in your unconscious. This information will help you decipher much faster and with more sophistication your thoughts, feelings, behaviors and motivations. This information will help you solve those impossible problems more effectively, but more importantly, it will help prevent many of them from occurring in the first place. This is what everyday happiness looks like.

2

Beginning

The most widely known precept of Buddhism is that suffering is a fact of life that cannot be avoided. Efforts to ignore, suppress or deny the inevitable ironically create suffering that is unnecessary. At first glance, this notion that life is suffering seems a dismal proposition. However, below its surface is wise instruction: To live a happy life you must decide what is worth suffering for and how to suffer well.

The reality is that we all end up in complex life dramas with twists and turns we could never have imagined or anticipated. Many times we begin a new journey with the best of intentions only to have the whole thing unravel. Tragedy befalls each and every one of us. Most of us can accept that sometimes things don’t work out in our favor. Ask Floyd Horn about losing $380 million by missing the winning lottery ticket by one number. What must it have been like for Kevin Pearce to be a favorite for the gold medal in his first Olympics only to suffer a career-ending injury weeks before opening ceremonies?

These events are breathtaking in their misfortune. Most of the struggles we face on a day-to-day basis are nowhere near this magnitude. But our tragedies are still important. Just because someone may have suffered more than we have does not diminish our suffering or make it less important.

This book is based on a set of optimistic ideas, all of which seek to help you understand how to alleviate unnecessary suffering and how to embrace sacred suffering. One of those ideas is the straightforward principle that staying too long in a bad thing is a bad thing that leads to other bad things and prevents good things from happening. The key phrase here is too long. No one intentionally chooses suffering. It is more often thrust on us against our will. But we can choose to walk away from a bad thing once we see it’s no good. If we don’t walk away from a bad thing, we are inviting unnecessary suffering. When we do walk away, we open a space in our hearts and minds for something better to enter.

I am convinced that everything we do is to make ourselves happy. It is probably more accurate to say that our actions, at any given moment, are for the express purpose of making some part of ourselves happy. This does not mean that the action itself is enjoyable. A soldier training to be a Navy SEAL might be getting thrashed, but he knows that if he survives the training and becomes a SEAL, that will make him extremely happy and proud.

To say that everything we do is to make ourselves happy is controversial. However, consider for a moment the last few activities you engaged in before sitting down to read this book. Did you kiss your children and tuck them in bed? Eat a salad? Pour yourself a glass of wine? Ask an attractive girl at your gym out on a date? Scroll through Instagram, Tinder or Facebook? Do you see the common thread of happiness in all these activities?

Granted, many times our efforts to achieve happiness are gambles that do not pay off. You are not certain that reading this book will make you happier, but you are willing to take the chance. Why? Because in and of itself, taking the chance of learning new ideas that could bring you closer to the type of happiness you seek makes you happy.

I spent considerable time formulating the title of this book. Here are a few that ended up on the cutting room floor: What To Do With Impossible Problems, Winning The Unconscious Game, The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need (egotistical I know) and Thriving In Chaos. So why did I land on The Hard Work Of Happiness? First, I think true happiness is underappreciated, yet it motivates everything we do. From skipping stones at the lake with your children to helping build freshwater wells for villages in poverty-stricken countries halfway around the world, it is all about making ourselves happy. Second, personally and professionally, I have found achieving lasting, authentic happiness to be literally hard work.

But wait! Aren’t we warned